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By Sinan SalaheddinASSOCIATED PRESS • Tuesday July 30, 2013 6:28 AM

BAGHDAD — More than a dozen explosions, mainly from car bombs, ripped through marketplaces,
parking lots, a cafe and rush-hour crowds in Iraq yesterday, killing at least 58 people and pushing
the country’s death toll in July toward the 700 mark, officials said.

The bombings — 18 in all — are part of a wave of bloodshed that has swept across the country
since April, killing more than 3,000 people and worsening the already-strained ties between Iraq’s
Sunni minority and the Shiite-led government. The scale and pace of the violence, unseen since the
darkest days of the country’s insurgency, have fanned fears of a return to the widespread sectarian
bloodletting that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

With two days left in July, the month’s death toll stands at 680, according to an Associated
Press count. Most of those have come during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of dawn-to-dusk fasting
that began on July 10, making it Iraq’s bloodiest since 2007.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for yesterday’s attacks, but the Interior
Ministry blamed al-Qaida’s Iraqi branch and accused it of trying to widen the rift between Sunnis
and Shiites.

“The country is now facing a declared war waged by bloody sectarian groups that aim at flooding
the country with chaos and reigniting the civil strife,” the ministry said in a statement posted on
its website.

Yesterday’s attacks stretched from Mosul in the north to Baghdad in central Iraq and Basra in
the south.

In the capital, a dozen car bombs struck at least nine neighborhoods, all but two of them
predominantly Shiite, in the span of an hour, killing at least 37 people, police said.

A blast in the town of Mahmoudiyah outside Baghdad killed three people.

The wave of bombings also extended to Iraq’s majority-Shiite south.

Car bombs that struck an outdoor market and near a cluster of construction workers killed at
least seven civilians and wounded 35 in the city of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. A
blast near an outdoor market in the city of Samawa killed three and wounded 14, officials said.

Another car bomb in a marketplace in the oil-rich city of Basra, about 340 miles southeast of
Baghdad, killed four people and wounded five, according to police.

Outside the northern city of Mosul, which has been a major flash point in the recent surge of
violence, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a military post, killing one
soldier and wounding three others.

Last night, police said three people died and nine others were wounded when a bomb went off in a
small cafe in Madain, 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.